Gender

One only needs to turn to an unsuspecting neighbour or family friend and drop the term ‘trafficking’ to appreciate the indelible nexus between anti-trafficking discourse and gender. You are likely to hear the perfect conjuring up of everything that trafficking was and has been associated with for a very long time, namely the deception of a young girl or woman into prostitution in a foreign land against her will. The location might change and the means of deception will assume a contextual tone, but the daily drip feed of media will ensure the production of the stock image of the innocent, young, female victim of trafficking.
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Women alleging rape in asylum claims are often considered not credible due to cultural and gender-based stereotypes. To be heard, and believed, they must position themselves as ‘appropriately’ vulnerable.

Marriage migrants in the UK are highly vulnerable to domestic violence because state immigration and welfare policies leave them with few rights. This exacerbates the gendered power imbalances within marriages.

Migrant women are vulnerable to violence at all stages of their journey due to gendered inequalities and relations of domination. Current EU policies restricting migration exacerbate their vulnerability.

The global non-recognition of domestic and care workers in law and social policy intensifies their exploitation. Their international movement exposes the gendered structural and legal violence of global capitalism.

Victimisation of women is still dominant in policies and discourse on trafficking. Could a gendered approach that accounts for the structural factors creating women’s vulnerabilities effectively challenge this?

Beyond Trafficking and Slavery seeks to help those trying to understand forced labour, trafficking and slavery by combining the rigour of academic scholarship with the clarity of journalism. Our goal is to use evidence-based advocacy to unveil the structural political, economic, and social root causes of global exploitation.

Gendered, racist, classist, homophobic, and transphobic violence haunts the world of sex work. Sex workers speak. Who listens? addresses that violence, but it does so from the perspective of sex workers themselves. By publishing their voices directly we hope to help readers resist indifference and to become more critical of states’ interventions.

The BTS Short Course brings 167 contributions from 150 top academics and practitioners into the world’s first open access ‘e-syllabus’ on forced labour, trafficking, and slavery. This eight-volume set is packed with insights from the some of the best and most progressive scholarship available. Read on...